Pablo Neruda Quotes

Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter.

I remember only a day
that was perhaps never intended for me,
it was an incessant day,
without origins, Thursday.
I was a man transported by chance
with a woman vaguely found,
we undressed
as if to die or swim or grow old
and we thrust ourselves one inside the other,
she surrounding me like a hole,
I cracking her like a bell,
for she was the sound that wounded me
and the hard dome determined to tremble.

Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don't remember a single detail
and haven't kept even a trace
of your first light.

It's well known that we are born.

It's well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen's quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.

It's well known that we were all born.

But if that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till ev

You are like nobody since I love you.

A song of despair


The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.

And now, beloved, through the crackling sea
we return like blind birds

Never an illness, nor the absence
of grandeur, no,
nothing is able to kill the best in us,
that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with:
beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct,
and every door opens on the beautiful truth
and never hides treacherous whispers.
I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.

For human beings, not to speak is to die"
-from "The Word

I love the piece of earth you are,
because in all the planetary prairies
I do not have another star. You repeat
the multiplication of the universe.

I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast.

With your name on my mouth
and a kiss that never
broke away from yours.

Once more I am the silent one who came out of the distance wrapped in cold rain and bells: I owe to earth's pure death the will to sprout.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

Laugh at the night, at the day, at the moon, laugh at the twisted streets of the island, laugh at this clumsy boy who loves you, but when I open my eyes and close them, when my steps go, when my steps return, deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter for I would die.

Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!

I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

Forgive me if my eyes see
no more clearly than sea foam,
please forgive that my form
grows outward without license
and never stops:
monotonous is my song,
my word is a shadow bird,
fauna of stone and sea, the grief
of a winter planet, Incorruptible.
Forgive me this sequence of water,
of rock, of foam, of the tide's
delirium: this is my loneliness:
salt in sudden leaps against the walls
of my secret being, in such a way
that I am a part
of winter,
of the same flat expanse that repeats
from bell to bell, in wave after wave,
and from a silence like a woman's hair,
a silence of seaweed, a sunken song.

I want to do for you what the spring does for the cherry trees

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

I love you like the plant that does not bloom
and carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,

Whenever you touch topaz, it touches you. It awakens a gentle fire, like wine awakens in grapes. Still unborn, clear wine seeks channels amidst stone, demands words, bestows its secret nourishment, shares out the kiss of human skin. The touch of stone and man in serene peace kindles garlands of fleeting flowers, which then return to prime sources: flesh and stone: contrary elements. (Translation, Beatriz von Eidlitz)

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.

Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul? When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate, and just after learning to walk, we are tripped, and just for wanting to love, we are hated, and for no more than touching, we are hurt, which of us hasn't started to arm himself, to make himself sharp, somehow, like a knife, to pay back the hurt?

. . . they will say: "The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep, more other . . .

I asked of every thing
if it had
something more,
something more than shape and form,
and I learned that way that nothing is empty
everything is a box, a train, a boat
loaded with implications,
every foot that walked along a path
left a telegram written in the stone,
and clothes in the washing water
dripped out their whole existence."
-from "Investigations

My soul wandered, happy, sad, unending.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

We all arrive by different streets, by unequal languages, at Silence.

Woman, I would have been your child, to drink the milk of your breasts as from a well, to see and feel you at my side and have you in your gold laughter and your crystal voice.
To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by
to emerge in the stanza-cleansed of all evil.
How I would love you woman, how I would love you, love you as no one ever did!
Die and still
love you more.
And still
love you more
and more.

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

In the eyes of mourning the land of dreams begins.

Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.

It's well known that he who returns never left

Por que en las epocas oscuras
se escribe con tinta invisible?
Why in the darkest ages
do they write with invisible ink?

I got lost in the night, without the light
of your eyelids, and when the night surrounded me
I was born again: I was the owner of my own darkness.

I had no more alphabet than the journeying of the swallows, the pure and tiny water of the small, fiery bird that dances rising from the pollen.

Over your breasts of motionless current,
over your legs of firmness and water,
over the permanence and the pride
of your naked hair
I want to be, my love, now that the tears are
thrown
into the raucous baskets where they accumulate,
I want to be, my love, alone with a syllable
of mangled silver, alone with a tip
of your breast of snow.

"Your Breast is Enough"
By Pablo Neruda
Your breast is enough for my heart,
and my wings for your freedom.
What was sleeping above your soul will rise
out of my mouth to heaven.
In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.
I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
You gather things to you like an old road.
You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated
that had been sleeping in your soul.

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Death stretches out like a clothesline, and then suddenly blows:
blows a dark sound that swells the sheets
and beds are sailing into a harbor
where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive has its two sides;
a word is one wing of silence,
fire has its cold half.
I love you in order to begin to love you,
to start infinity again
and never to stop loving you:
that's why I do not love you yet.
I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held
keys in my hand: to a future of joy-
a wretched, muddled fate-
My love has two lives, in order to love you.
-Sonnet XLIV

And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.

Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicet of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?

My beauty, flower by flower, star by star,
wave by wave, love, I have counted your body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

I can scarcely measure the sky's most spacious eyes and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth.

Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks"

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

I want to see the thirst
inside the syllables
I want to touch the fire
in the sound:
I want to feel the darkness
of the cry. I want
words as rough
as virgin rocks. - Verb.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty
distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest.

Die Slowly' by Pablo Neruda:
He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.

My ugly one, I love you for your waist of gold,
my beauty, I love you because of a wrinkle on your forehead,
love, I love you because you are clear and dark.

Sonnet XII

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

I love your feet
because they have
wandered over
the earth and through
the wind and water
until they brought
you to me.

It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.

Without doubt I praise the wild excellence ...

You should know that I don't love you and that I love you.

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it?

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul
You live again in time, slender and silent.

To love is to tilt with the lightning, two bodies routed by a single honey's sweet.

I like for you to be still, and you are still far away.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

Who do I belong to? How come I mortgaged my being till I don't belong to myself? How come I sold my blood? And who now owns my indecisions, my hands, my private pain, my pride?

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

How long does a man live, after all?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
A week, or several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say 'for ever'?
Lost in these preoccupation
I set myself to clear things up.
...
In my own country the undertakers
answered me, between drinks:
'Get yourself a good woman
and give up this nonsense.'
"And How Long" - Pablo Neruda

He who has nothing - it has been said many times - has nothing to lose but his chains.

Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery;
that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth.
I repaid vileness with doves.

Oh, may your silhouette not be broken in the sand,
oh may your eyelids not fly in the absence:
do not go for one minute, beloved,
because in that minute you will have gone so far
that I will cross all the earth asking
if you will return or if you will leave me dying.

How did the abandoned bicycle
win its freedom?

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

You pervade everything, you, pervade everything.

Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots?

No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing.

It's hard to tell
if we close our eyes or if night
opens in us other starred eyes,
if it burrows into the wall of our dream
till some other door opens.
But the dream
is only the flitting costume of one moment,
is spent in one beat
of the darkness,
and falls at our feet, cast off
as the day stirs and sails away with us."
-from "In the Tower

I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us.

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness, and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood? Que diran de mi poesia los que no tocaron mi sangre?

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

I know, I know, but here beside the water
while the locusts chitter and sparkle,
although they are waiting, I want to wait for myself.
I too want to watch myself.
I want to discover at last my own feelings.
And when I reach the place where I am waiting,
I expect to fall asleep, dying of laughter.

Poetry

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

I hold a dramatic and romantic concept of life; What doesn't touch my senses means nothing to me

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.

I move in the university of the waves.

You came to my life with what you were bringing, made of light and bread and shadow I expected you, and Like this I need you, Like this I love you, and to those who want to hear tomorrow that which I will not tell them, let them read it here, and let them back off today because it is early for these arguments.

while inside, a ferocious love wound around
and around me-till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword,
slashing a seared road through my heart

100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases ...

I stood on the balcony dark with mourning ... hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

Neither the heart cut by a sliver of glass in a wasteland of thorns, nor the atrocious waters seen in the corners of certain houses, waters like eyelids and eyes, could hold your waist in my hands when my heart lifts its oak trees toward your unbreakable thread of snow. Night sugar, spirit of crowns, redeemed human blood, your kisses banish me, and a surge of water with remnants of the sea strikes the silences that wait for you surrounding the worn-out chairs, wearing doors away.

Today is today, and yesterday is gone. There is no doubt.

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:
because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
galloping water, incessant sand,
we make the only permanent tenderness.

A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.

Si todos los rios son dulces
de donde saca sal el mar?
If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?

It was beautiful to live
when you lived!

I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.
In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait

Remembering her, it is as if my heart were buried in the rain.
Again I think it's she, but why would she be coming now? Oh, what
sad days!
[ ... ] Your eyes : two sleepy cups darkened by purple berries from
the forest undergrowth. What a leaf, a leaf from a white vine,
fragrant and heavy, I could have brought you from the forest. Every-
thing flees from this solitude enforced by rain and contemplation.

Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives you will have it steaming and burning at your tables: so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times: you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes, this bowl of silent blood that will be there each morning, each morning. A